Last week at Supernova, I bumped into Seth Goldstein. I mentioned how impressed I was by his Facebook applications. At the time I had no idea how successful they had become. Later that day, Seth wrote a post that cleared it up for me …

Our first application for Facebook was Trakzor, which we ported from MySpace, where it has millions of users who use the service to see who is checking them out. Within days, Trakzor for Facebook went from nothing, to thousands, to hundreds of thousands of users. It was such an adrenaline rush to see social media growing at scale; at its peak growth spurt two weeks ago, more than 7,000 people were adding the application per hour. …

On the heels of this growth, we decided relax the focus on Attention with a capital A and start developing fun, interactive software that leveraged the implicit social graph of Facebook. And so FoodFight was born… By the time you read this there will be more than 1,000,000 FoodFight users (in less than two weeks).

Congratulations to Seth and his team at AttentionSoft!

For those of you who were at the Supernova conference today and requested a copy of my slides, they are now online. You can download them as either PowerPoint Presentation or PDF.

If you were not, I’ll be doing a longer post on Read/WriteWeb later to review the material covered in the presentation.

I’ll be at Supernova from Wednesday to Friday this week. Let me know if you want to get together.

profitablesignals at Gmail dot com

So this post is a day late, but it has been a very busy week …

As I posted a few days ago, I was going to participate in my colleague’s at R/WW network’s blog Alt Search Engines idea for a day without the big 5. I did actually do this on Tuesday like intended. Unlike others, I did manage to make it all day without going back to Google. (ok - I did use Google once, but only once.)

I spent most of my time using two search engines. First, I used Hakia for most of the morning. In the afternoon, I followed Matt’s recommendation and used Clusty. While neither of them worked nearly as well as Google, it was interesting to see what my queries turned up.

Interestingly, while I’m not a expert in information retrieval - it seems like some of this is because I seem to have good intuition what keywords will work well for what queries. I’m curious if I would have started to learn heuristics for keywords to get the results I want had I spent more than a day in either engine. Regardless, the results weren’t so much better that it feels at all compelling to switch.

My colleague at the Read/WriteWeb network site, Alt Search Engine, has posed an interesting challenge:

We at AltSearchEngines are actually asking everyone to go one day (6 am - midnight), this Tuesday, without using one of the major search engines; Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, or Ask.

I personally think this is a really interesting idea. I’m thinking of trying a few out on Tuesday. Any suggestions?

A few months ago, after returning from SXSW I submitted their post-conference feedback form. While I had a great experience, the one thing I encouraged them to work on was getting the wifi better straightened out next year.

Tonight in my email inbox, I received the following note from Hugh:

Sean,

Hey . . this is Hugh Forrest from the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin.

I have been spending a lot of time during the last few months reading feedback response from this year’s event.

To this end . . I wanted to thank you for the post-event feedback — getting feedback such as yours helps us to continue to improve the event.

And, wanted to take a second to respond to one of your comments

I ended up having to use my Verizon EVDO connection for the web connection. I know you had plenty of pipe from UT, but the the DNS server was terrible.

Yes, massive problems with the Wi-Fi at the Austin Convention Center. On the one hand, my understanding is that the number of users in a relatively small location would tax even the most sophisticated of wireless setups. On the other hand . . . just have to find a better solution for 2008. And, we are working on this. Only correction in regards to your comment is hat the pipe was not coming from UT, but from the Austin Convention Center.

Also . . not sure if you saw this, but we catalogued a lot of the complaints (err, constructive criticism!) about the event on a recent post on the SXSW Interactive website. See http://2007.sxsw.com/community_blog/?p=97

Thanks again for your feedback about the event . . and I hope to see you back at the Austin Convention Center next spring!

Best regards,

Hugh Forrest

I was already planning on going and covering the event for Read/WriteWeb again next year. However, notes like this (which obviously wasn’t just a mass email) leave me with an even better feeling about SXSW. Great service and amazing conference!

My buddy Charlie O’Donnnell wrote a great post this morning on 10 ways to become a VC analyst. Charlie knows a thing or two about this having been Union Square’s first analyst after working at a pension fund.

My favorite one:

1) Make a digital home for yourself.

If I haven’t beat this to death already, creating a digital presence, preferably through a blog, gives people you connect with a landing page. It is the center of operations for all your online networking and a place for people to assess what you’re all about, what you’re thinking, etc–the equivalent of hoisting a sail on a windy day. No presence, no sail.

I’ve written about this before here & pointed to Charlie. Blogs are the new resumes!!

Also covered on Bijan’s blog and apparently the advice matches their experience at Spark Capital.

At the recent Open Source Business Conference (how did I miss this), David Skok from Matrix Partners did a presentation on Open Source Business Models. This is a topic that I’ve been thinking about regularly both here and on Read/WriteWeb.

Anyway, according to David 3% of all OSS users pay for a support contract. David certainly knows the market (was going to say “space” but caught myself). Anyway, if you’re modeling out profitability of open source businesses this is probably a helpful data point!

For the rest of us, just really interesting data. I’d love to get a copy of the presentation!

Hat Tip: Don Dodge

A few months ago I upgraded my PC to a 15″ Mac Book Pro. While the migration was very straight forward and pleasant, I have realized that after using a PC for about 20 years, I’ve had a number of interactions that were completely subconscious. As an example, I would know what to do when the icon switched to an hour glass and seemed to be not going away (in this case pray and hit [CTRL] [ALT] [DELTE].

However, I’m relearning all these things on my Mac. Luckily, the interface seems much more straight forward and the system is definitely more stable. (Except when you load terrible Verizon Software.) The experience has helped me come to an even greater appreciation for the value of user studies.

One of my colleagues at mSpoke, Thi Avrahami, has a master’s degree of Human Computer Interaction from CMU. She has worked with a number of our clients to do user studies. Since two of the hats I wear is product manager and relationship manager for all accounts, I end up being engaged with all these projects.

One of the things Thi is very good at is selecting the right way to ask users to show her their experience and coming up with the right questions about that experience. This is really important, because just like I did on my PC, users do so much subconsciously. You have to figure out the right way to ask the question or setup the exercise to ensure you are actually getting data and not just noise.

Once you figure out what users are able to understand, you can revise the interaction to improve the speed and clarity that they have about your products capabilities. In other words, if you don’t do user studies and other forms of interaction studies, you really are leaving value on the table!

As a side note: We have been so busy lately at mSpoke that we’ve added some extra bandwidth to our user study team. We’ve started working with Lisa Spitz Design on some engagements as well. Lisa & I finished our first report to a client and she is world-class. I’d strongly recommend her work to anyone interested in doing some user studies.

Pretty funny - http://lol.ianloic.com/feed/feeds.feedburner.com/ProfitableSignals

My friend John just pointed this out to me.